To Nora, on her tenth birthday

Dear Nora,

No doubt by now you’ve gotten the picture: double digits is a big deal. It’s arbitrary, really, and I know you didn’t feel markedly different between your last night of being nine and your first morning of newly-minted ten-ness, but as humans, this is a thing we do. We pick special occasions and we make a fuss and we celebrate; it is, I think, one of the loveliest things about us. For that reason, and others, ten is a really big deal. It is also, unfortunately for you and your friends, now very easy for moms and dads of children your age to frown at this or that behavior and say things like, “Come on! You’re ten-years-old!” Don’t let us engage in this lazy brand of parenting too often.

Due to the particular math involved in your birth date and my own, you turned ten the same year that I turned 40, another milestone, although it involved more “over the hill” cards and sarcastic commentary than reaching the decade-mark, which is all smiles and ice-cream cake, and aunts and uncles exclaiming, “How is she already 10?! I just can’t believe it!” People didn’t quite do the same to me - remark with disbelief and poetic language, questioning the very passage of time - but I did get to go out for beers and a late night Billy Joel singalong on my birthday with my 40-plus-year-old friends, who are still SUPER FUN, by the way, something I know is hard to believe. Being 40, which is a subject I’ll return to in a minute (because I know you are dying to hear about it instead of reading graphic novels about people your own age in your cozy bed) is much more interesting than I ever imagined at your age.

Ten, instead, seems to be all about reaching a precipice of sorts, standing on a hilltop and getting your first glimpses of the joyful, sometimes worrisome fireworks exploding just around the bend.

When I was in college at Boston University, I enrolled an interdisiplinary program that wove our humanities and science requirements into one interlocking block of study, led by some of the university’s most notable faculty with a focus on “big ideas.” It was called the “Core Curriculum” and it drew a lot of students like me, bound for English and Philosophy majors and not too keen on fulfilling the math part at all, except we had to, so we took courses like statistics, and learned that there are still word problems in college, thank god.

When I walked into the lecture hall on my first day of the program, 18-years-old, in corduroys probably, and having just tacked up a large poster of Bob Dylan on my dorm room wall, there was a quotation projected on a large screen suspended above the stage. It was by T.S. Eliot, from his poem “Little Gidding”:

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

This quote is used regularly in academics, self-help books, you name it, but I’d never heard it before that day, and let me tell you something. I LOVED IT. I loved the wonder and optimism that emanated from those words. And I loved the bustling lecture hall and the smiling, timid students who I was going engage in witty intellectual banter with over mochas later at the university coffee shop I just knew it!

(I loved collge, Nora. I loved high school, also, and I attribute those positive experiences to having amazing friends, who are still my friends to this day. I have no doubt you’ll also have amazing experiences and friends, which we can talk about later. Or actually, I’ll probably deliver an impromtu, self-righteous lecture on the importance of being a good friend, and maintaining friendships in general, on the way home in the minivan today, and I’m sorry in advance for that).

I’ve thought about this idea - which is not confined to the above quote - throughout my life. This idea of knowing. Knowing a place, a person, a feeling. Knowing yourself. And as I warned - ahem - promised above, I want to talk about being 40, just a little. Because when I was ten - and when I was a teenager, and in my twenties and even five years ago - I imagined that at 40-years-old, I’d be a more surefooted, fully-evolved version of myself. I’d be a cautious and adept decision-maker, accomplished writer, avid reader of thoughtful literature and less-avid reader of political tweets long into the night, despite expert advice that we should keep our phones out of our bedrooms if we want to sleep well.

I think young people should - deserve - to think this about their parents. That their parents have it figured out, at least mostly. And I’d never want to take that impression away from you or your siblings. Because in terms of your safety and happiness, we have got it figured out. We’d do anything to secure both.

What I’m trying to say, instead, is that in terms of the rest of it, like being surefooted and adept and accomplished and decisive; in terms of the “end of all our exploring,” so to speak, 40 feels like a hilltop, too, when what I thought was that it would be a plateau.

And it is fascinating. The 40-something set I know is dealing with the unthinkable and traversing the un-traversed. They are reinventing and revising. They are unsure and successful and globetrotting and home-bodying. They are changing the collective world and still figuring out their own.

Ok. I realize that a letter to a ten-year-old, and especially you, could have played out a different way. I could have remarked upon your amazing personality…enthusiasm and skepticism and confidence at once. Your self-possession, wise acknowledgment of your fears and how you embrace your talents. I could have written about your skills for taming your younger brother and sister - who are, let’s get real, impossible to deal with at times - as well as your true friendships with each, sharing what will one day be long-lived private jokes with Gabriel, and playing princess games with Aidy when I’m pretty sure you do not want to be playing princess games in the slightest; reminding her to be kind and polite and generous, and helping her steer clear of becoming Regina George from “Mean Girls,” which could honestly happen, Nora. You know it and I know it. I could have written about how good you are at helping take care of your cousin, Rory, and how you’re a natural with all little kids; how they gravitate towards you because of that.

I could have talked about current events and politics - and yelled, in all caps, about current events and politics, for paragraphs and paragraphs - highlighting the battles that I hope your generation will continue to fight. The problems that I hope your generation will obliterate.

But when I thought about you turning 10 all I could think about was the possibility buzzing in your future. Then I thought about being 40, and how although I didn’t realize it until now, that same possibility has an incredibly long shelf life. It’s buzzing, still.

I just wanted to make sure you knew that the exploring lasts forever. And although it’s sometimes difficult, it’s also so much fun.

I love deciphering author’s words, but feel strange in making a solid declaration one way or the other. I mean, I don’t know exactly what Eliot meant when he wrote his poem, but I know what I take away from it. The endless rewards of exploring and uncertainty. And as I mentioned above, I also think a lot about the knowing.

What I tend to think is that we get very few moments of pure certainty in this lifetime. I don’t view this as a negative in the slightest, becasue that’s what makes them so remarkable. I think we “know the place” over and over again, but that the feeling is necessarily fleeting.

I won’t (because I know you want to get back to that graphic novel) indulge in a litany of personal experiences here although I will say that my first meeting your dad, and our relationship since, has possessed that quality of certainty for me, and I’m so lucky for that.

Then, Nora, there was September 20, 2008.

I’ve talked about your birth many times over the years. How you did not want to come out. The reggae they played. The bright lights. The funny doctors. And suddenly, you.

All our wondering, all the possibility, bundled and wide-eyed, five days before your due date, like you couldn’t wait. The hospital room bustling with potential, decades and decades worth.

But in those first few minutes, it was like tunnel vision. Me and your dad, gazing back. No “what’s next? or why? or should I?” Just a perfect happy birthday. Just an inevitable, “of course.”

xoxo

Things I like, back to school edition

A couple nights ago, because he agreed to marry me and will therefore be victim of my unanticipated proclamations forever and ever - get used to it buddy, although I’m sure you probably are already - J received news that I was “feeling a little unmotivated, but for no good reason,” announced, by the way, as I settled into bed with a murder mystery around 8:45 pm.

I mean, really. No good reason. We live in a new house, the kids are happily enrolled and thriving in a new school and life is decidedly easier than it was in years past. Due to these specific changes, yes, but more importantly, due to a very distinct feeling of settling in that’s been absent from our lives until now. How are we going to set up our new living room? No idea! But we are going to set that baby up and then hang out there for years and years to come.

No good reason. Except, as I contemplated the feeling once again this morning, I realized that there is a very good reason, one that will dissipate as September rolls on. The transition. The yearly ritual, from the whimsy of summer to the rigidity of a new academic year, marked by its telltale signs: shoes lined up next to backpacks; the removal of uneaten items from lunchboxes at day’s end (the carrots, you guys, come on!); the perusal of math homework and PTA announcements and ensuring the laundry is done in a timely manner because you can’t just put your bathing suit on and assume it’ll serve as acceptable daywear.

It’s a transition I like, I might add. All that newness, all those blank notebooks. But it had also been a very good summer, heady and unplanned in all the best ways. We saw seals in Cape Cod and told ghost stories in Cape May. We celebrated family and love and life and were occasionally very, exceedingly hot, attempting sleep above the covers and nearly losing our minds before I promptly ordered some window air conditioning units that I “didn’t think we’d need” this year. Which, it turned out, was incorrect. Just incredibly incorrect.

That, I think, was the feeling I was having the other night, tough to capture and name. Just a transition. Excitement for the new year but already missing those seasonal freedoms, like staying and waking up later. Meeting by the pool with a cold beer.

The cure, as mentioned above, is time, naturally. But also looking inward and forward, indulging in the cultural and practical items I’ve been enjoying as of late, as well as planning for future events that fit the coming season.

(I feel, as I type these words, that someone out there probably wants to point out that pumpkin beer is coming, in a move half-genuine, half meant-to-enrage-me, so fine, go ahead).

Anyway. Long intro. Happy beginning of the school year, all. Here are few things I’m excited about:

• The other night I got to have dinner with some of my extended family without my children, a rare treat, allowing me to fully engage in the discussions at hand. At one point during the evening, I was sitting across from my cousin Sam, who is in his late twenties, and somehow (Sam, how?) we started talking about folk singer-songwriter John Prine, and how much we both loved him, which was amusing as - not to generalize here - but you wouldn’t have pegged us two as the John Prine fans at the table, considering there were older more experienced people there. Sam, to my utter delight, started listing lyrics and talking about themes, and I shared with him that the reason I love John Prine so much was that when I was doing an internship on an organic farm as an impressionable 18-year-old during my senior year of high school, the people working there told me I just had to listen to him as we were sitting in the hot fields squashing bugs with our fingers, and I did, a memory I cherish because it’s just the right amount of ridiculous. I told Sam and the other family members, innocent bystanders to our rapid-fire conversation, that they needed to check out the live version of the song “Angel of Montgomery” with Bonnie Raitt, which you can listen to here. It is not a happy song. But god, I love it so much, and am most certainly on the cusp of a personal folk music revival. Good luck, kids.

• Another topic that night was how my Aunt Betsey and Uncle Mark are watching the British version of “The Office,” which, those of you who know me or have read this blog, know is my all-time favorite. This got me all pumped up as I realized, giddily, that they were going to get to watch Season One, Episode Four, for the very first time in their lives. And that I was going to have to watch it again for approximately the hundreth time, because there is nothing better.

• The idea of throwing a midterms viewing party on November 6, which could be, depending on your political views, a really fun night, or a really awful one. I’m willing to take the risk. Who’s in?

• A few notable books, as I finally regained the capability this summer to get through several paragraphs in a row without passing out cold or turning to binge-worthy television programs instead. I finished “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward, a difficult, incredibly important and haunting read, as well as “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson, recommended by my always trustworthy mother, who told me it was so good, so different and so surprising. Correct, Mom. I’m still working on Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened,” mostly because I can only get through three or four words at a time in the Russia chapter before I’m like, “YUP AND THEN THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED, WAY TO NAIL THE TITLE HILLARY!” (I miss you).

• I discovered a new podcast this summer called “Reply All,” which is about the internet, at least generally speaking, and which sounds like exactly the type of thing I would NOT be into, as we all know I’m not great at the managing online maneuvers. Or computers at all. Or even, let’s get real, my alarm clock. I stumbled onto an episode, however, and cannot get enough. It’s about how the internet intersects with culture, covering everything from everyday tech glitches to politics. I love the hosts and the way each episode cracks open both seeming non-issues and big questions, in totally fascinating ways, and with unexpected outcomes.

• Ishmael by Rising Tide Brewing, which I got to have in Maine this August. Perfect by the pool or on a cozy fall evening. Not a pumpkin beer. Calls to mind a favorite work of American fiction, due a re-reading. Five stars.